Happy Fourth to all. I hope everyone gets the picnic food and fireworks that they want. Kye Ok is working this weekend, so our celebration is going to be something fairly low key in the evening. Perhaps we’ll be walking outside and watching the neighboring high school. Last year they had a fireworks display in the middle of their football field, and I hope that they do it again this year.

That’s one of the challenges being married to someone in the medical field. They work on weekends and holidays.

Back when I was fresh out of college, one reason I decided not to go into wildlife was that you have to work on the animals’ schedules, and most people don’t get that or you. Why are you banding ducks on the Fourth of July?, they’d ask. You could have all the beer you wanted if only you would be a normal person and come to my party.

Plants are more accommodating in a 9 to 5 world, and that’s one of the many reasons I went into botany. Still, I’ve gotten nasty, nasty remarks from zoologists I’ve worked with, who assume that you can go out with them at 4 am. They’ll survey their birds, while you map the vegetation in the dark… They’re done by 10 am and call it an eight hour day, while you’re just halfway into mapping. But I’m not cynical about that industry. Really.

Now, of course, I’m sharing my life with a wonderful woman who works with those strange animals called people. And people get sick at all sorts of inconvenient times, so she has to work an inconvenient schedule. Come to our wonderful party, our relatives say (our friends know better than to drop snap invitations). Sorry, we reply. Kye Ok’s got to work, and anyway, if we’d wanted to take the 4th off, we would have had to schedule it last year.. And so it goes.

That’s how life is these days. Holidays need to be scheduled six months to a year in advance.

Still, the Fourth of July is as close as we get to a summer solstice celebration. I hope everyone reading this has a happy fourth, whatever you do.